Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Pussy Riot Report by Julia Ioffe

By John Ballard

Julia Ioffe is an American writer living in Russia. Her Twitter messages are a sparkling, delightful stream. Often they are in Russian and I resort to Google Translate to find out what she's saying, but her observations are keen and insightful. This report on the recent trial of Pussy Riot can be read as an extension of their, um... performance art.

Though Pussy Riot's goal was to challenge Russian society through performance art, they were soon to discover that Putin's state insisted on imposing its own distinct political aesthetic. "Of course, the indictment came down on Forgiveness Sunday," Petr Verzilov said, referring to the fact that the criminal charge coincided with the day that Russian Orthodox believers ask each other's forgiveness before the beginning of Lent. "The people in the Kremlin are obviously given to small acts of theatricality."

THIS WAS PERFECTLY clear on the first day of the trial, which kicked off with statements from the defendants, read out by their lawyers. The young women, who sat in a cage of bulletproof glass (known colloquially as "the aquarium") apologized to the Orthodox believers they had offended; Tolokonnikova called it "an ethical mistake." Alyokhina, herself an Orthodox believer, apologized but also expressed her dismay at the lack of Christian forgiveness. "I thought the Church loved all its children," she said in her written statement. "But it turns out it only loves those children who love Putin."

And that's where the loftiness ended and reality began to disintegrate. The judge overruled the defense's motion to call any of its thirty five witnesses at the trial: the reason given was that it was too early, but she ended up rejecting the motion again and again throughout the proceedings. The prosecutor began to mutter his way through the indictment, using phrases like "imitating the Gates of Heaven" and "songs of an insulting, blasphemous nature." The girls, drifting off in their aquarium, stood accused by the Russian state of being motivated by "religious hatred," of "demonstratively and cynically putting themselves in opposition to the Orthodox world" and of "trying to devalue centuries of revered and protected dogmas" and "encroaching on the rights and sovereignty of the Russian Orthodox Church." Somewhere else in there was a statement about how the young women of Pussy Riot had shaken "the spiritual foundations" of the Russian Federation, which, until that point, had given the distinct impression of being a secular state.

Readers owe it to themselves to take a moment to enjoy this entire article. I'm sure the original performance was more exciting, but this report is almost as entertaining. And for Ioffe it's better than the GOP clown show selecting a candidate -- a story that just keeps on giving.